I'll be damned Ben. I just wrote that piece to Landry which I also sent you for your perusal, and then I log on to post & receive any new mail & what do I get but nearly a word for word reflection of everything I had pondered. Geez guy, you and I certainly think alike. About leather, while yes, I was a leather & mohawk phreak in the middle 1980s, and can find both the aroma and aesthetic appealing when confronted by it, in terms of punk rock's not dead and any arrive alive motorcycle culture, but when I speak of bondage I am drawn toward the composure, the counterpoint of cotton fabric, or office professional lace & latitude, long & short dresses, brassieres of all sorts, serious treatments where the woman is aggressive or submissive. I might find myself dressed in all white. Exotic places, dame or damsel, woman or wife in distress, railroad tracks, nurse and teacher, smacking uniforms but never cheesy plastic buffoonery. Admittedly drawn to clothing fetishes but since the mainstreaming of leather, and certain conditions of my own personality, my own soul I have dismissed the leather scene as pompously vain & vulgar. Ropes and clamps, perhaps more than chains & other strategic hardware, would be my own restraints of choice, must be the German in me, but frankly Ben, I have experienced, or experimented with little to none of the B&D protocol except pictorial literature exposed to me early in life by those True Detective rags found in the news stands of my youth. And as we have both pointed out, it seems only a tiny fraction of us get to fully experience our sexual desires in action.

Next, I found myself ridiculed then pursued by an intelligent, motivated, role-playing, self-measured, resolute socialite of sorts, nine years my senior who worked at the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta who aimed for personal control, and finally a very pretty, (even beautiful when her stylings fell into place for any given season), reserved, passive, benign, charitable woman whose strength is her compassion and loyalty, six years older than I am, not too delicate, but still somewhat adventuresome, dutiful, an accountant, the woman whom I married and bingo, I was finally set in stone.

I was a nice, unpresumptuous, commendable kid. White socks and checkered trousers, a nerd, a dandy, a boy scout, an athelete, a wallflower except when I knew what was under the tent flap, knew the rules, knew how far I could press the powers into a match point as I did throughout my school days with teachers who were no competition for their own academic mission or me, prowled everywhere by homosexual predators, the first time just after turning fourteen, and became an immediate masturbation junkie after my molestation by a man in his forties. Only three dates in highschool, both big prom events and one other disastrous outing, where I slid into first base and got thrown out of the game. I was too soft for the girls who preferred the more robust jocks and loud-mouthed cigarette-lipped hard rock hoodlums, gearhead thugs, strangely we didn't have much of a local music scene where I went to school, but this taste of Eden was even true for the good girls with whom I ran around town, in and out of class, but remained just friends as it turned out.

Still a virgin at 18 and having moved away from my parents and five siblings in white trash Florida to just outside Chicago to work for the big bucks of Bethlehem Steel Corporation on Lake Michigan, I was seduced by a woman twice my age. She was a Jehovah's Witness, mother of three kids aged 6, 12, 16, the latter, my only friend in that strange land of stranger consequences. I had been publicly considering moving those 1200 miles back home to my girlfriend Eva when this weak, dependent, vengeful, neurotic, not beautiful but handsome woman removed her blouse and brassiere to lay hands on me some snowy wee hour in December, 1973. My immediate sense of guilt, her immediate bucket of tears once she was entered, remorse, religious baggage, loneliness, the quicker pull out and collapse of boyish penury, hardship, guilt and feminine wiles at work plus her nude-on-the-sofa marriage proposal forever changed my life (or did it?). The five of us lived a hell of familial imbalance no one should ever live for three years. It was another ten years before her Jehovah God finally allowed her to properly divorce me (because someone else in the kingdom I imagine found her attractive enough to pursue).

Even after that frightening criminal affair, and the homosexual gags, I remained a kid of relative innocence, still shy around women, girls. Too smart, too tender, too righteous and well-behaved, a perfect gentleman further torqued by the demands of the first and second waves of the sexual revolution for the sexual plottings of young women my own age, but definitely did not ever consider myself homosexual (I refuse to use the term gay to describe those situations). In my twenties, goodlooking enough but neurotically unsure of it, I felt unsteady, desperate to annul my past, self-punishing, lost forever. Finally in my mid-20s a series of older women again invaded my youth. First lengthy post-marriage stint was with good-looking, highly sexualized woman 14 years my senior, unfortunately the mother of six robust children. Next, I found myself ridiculed then pursued by an intelligent, motivated, role-playing, self-measured, resolute socialite of sorts, nine years my senior who worked at the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta who aimed for personal control, and finally a very pretty, (even beautiful when her stylings fell into place for any given season), reserved, passive, benign, charitable woman whose strength is her compassion and loyalty, six years older than I am, not too delicate, but still somewhat adventuresome, dutiful, an accountant, the woman whom I married and bingo, I was finally set in stone.

That's enough for now. I just wanted to blather on about how remarkable my letter to Landry and your letter to me conspired to bring yet another strange smile to my face, and a loud thanks to my lips.

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